More about the film: K.R.O. Germany 1947

5th November 2008

In my last post, I described the short documentary film K.R.O. Germany 1947, which was filmed in Germany in the Autumn of 1947 and first released in Britain in January 1948.

An article written by the film’s director, Graham Wallace, for the journal Documentary Film News, provides a further insight into why and how the film was made.

In the credits, the film was billed as a co-production between the British Crown Film Unit, and the German Junge Film Union, a group of young film makers established in Hamburg after the war. The director and unit manager were British, the cameraman, his assistant, the editor, electricians, production manager, script girl and sound technicians were all German.

In the article, the location for the film was identified as Peine, a small country town lying between Hanover and Brunswick, selected because life there was: “… typical, on a small scale, of life all over Germany. Here we find all the problems of the Black Market, shortages of clothing and food, overcrowded accommodation, idle factories and refugees that were the concern of the central character of our film – the Kreis Resident Officer.”

Making the film in post-war Germany was not easy, in the director’s words: “very much harder than working under the most trying conditions in England.” There was a shortage of film and equipment. The German team were poorly paid, short of food, and hungry: “Like everyone else in Germany, they are strictly rationed on a low level, though they are entitled to draw heavy-workers’ rations. Even these, by English standards, are meagre indeed … Much of their salary went to buying extra food.” English members of the unit helped out with part of their, higher, rations. Transport was difficult. Motor transport was almost unobtainable locally, and “at one time we transported our lights through the streets of Peine on a horse-drawn cart!”

Processing the film locally in the British Zone proved impossible, as the laboratories  were subject to frequent power cuts which meant they “… cannot work for days at a time, until there is a guarantee of current being available for long enough to run a roll of film through the bath.” Eventually it had to be sent to Berlin and then returned to the team for viewing and editing. Interruptions in the electric current also caused problems when shooting, as the lights were run off the local electricity supply:  “This was never constant for more than a few minutes. All the members of the unit had to stand by the lamps ready to move them forwards or backwards with the voltage fluctuations.”

Probably most interesting was the description in the article of relations between the film unit and the local population. In contrast with the impression given in the film of the quiet and authoritative K.R.O. listening attentively to the German Bürgermeister (the mayor), sympathising with his problems, but also giving the German authorities clear instructions he expected to be obeyed, the article explained that, although at first the Burgermeister willingly consented to appear in the film, he later had second thoughts. “Apparently he had been accused by his colleagues on the council of undue ‘collaboration’ with the English and he was fearful for his re-election at the forthcoming municipal elections.”  Similarly, in contrast with the picture shown in the film of the K.R.O. sympathising with the plight of 300 refugees in temporary accommodation and being welcomed there when he visited them, the article revealed that they “regarded our operations as a put-up propaganda job by the English and demanded to know what we are going to do about sending them back home or giving them proper accommodation.”

On the other hand, as Graham Wallace explained in the article: “again and again we received great help and friendship from the people of Peine who appreciated what we were trying to do. They felt strongly the lack of mutual information about our two countries and if our little film would in any way help to promote an understanding of German problems in England, then they were quite willing to help.”

The only serious antagonism (and this was in 1947, well before political and diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies had formally broken down) was not with the Germans in Peine, but when the unit was filming near the border with the Russian Zone, when the sight of English and German technicians working together “aroused deep suspicion in the minds of the Russians guarding the frontier between the two Zones … otherwise we might well have been making a film in the English countryside, instead of in occupied Germany.”

The final paragraph of the article sums up, in many ways, a typical British view of post-war Germany and the German people.

“And when the shooting was finished and the unit broke up, the two English technicians had a much deeper insight and understanding of Germany today and the difficulties under which the German technicians work. The German technicians, too, had learnt something of the English tradition of documentary film production and later the [German] cameraman was able to visit England for two weeks to study our methods at first hand.”

Though Graham Wallace is describing film-making here, the same sentiments could be transferred to many other areas. Note how he describes himself, the director, and the British unit manager, as the two ‘English technicians’, modestly implying an equality of status with their German subordinates and colleagues. But note also how the “English tradition of documentary film production” is clearly assumed to be superior to the German tradition, which had been condescendingly referred to earlier in the article as dealing, not with “real people and their daily work”, but “for the main part of excellent instructional films or pretty studies of ‘Spring in an Alpine valley’ and other well-worn themes.” And the solution: was for one of the German technicians, the cameraman, to visit England and learn the English way of doing things, for himself.

 

Kreis Resident Officer – The film K.R.O. Germany 1947

2nd November 2008

In January 1948, a short 10 minute documentary film, called simply K.R.O. Germany 1947, was released in Britain. The film was part of a continued public relations effort by the British Control Commission for Germany, to show people back home the work they were doing in the best possible light.

It aimed to show a day in the life of a Kreis Resident Officer (or K.R.O.) – the Control Commission’s ‘man on the ground’ in the British Zone of Germany. In the words of the film, narrated by the K.R.O himself:

“Germany is split up into a number of units. The smallest of these is a district – or Kreis – one hundred and fifty thousand people live in this one, in one large town and fifty-eight villages, which come under the supervision of a British civilian officer – called the Kreis Resident Officer or K.R.O.

I am the K.R.O. of this particular Kreis. It is my job to know everything that goes on. To advise, observe and report on local affairs. The Control Commission relies on K.R.O.s to ensure that their orders for making Germany work again are carried out.”

In previous postings on this blog, I’ve described earlier efforts by the Control Commission to portray their work in Germany to people back home, in three official sources all produced in the first year after the end of the war in May 1945: the film A Defeated People, directed by Humphrey Jennings, the British Zone Review and the exhibition Germany under Control. It was therefore interesting to see how much had changed in the two years since then.

In contrast to the film A Defeated People, which showed a grim picture of destruction, tempered only by under-stated sympathy and concern for the suffering of people as individuals, the picture shown in K.R.O. Germany was that of a benevolent and sympathetic British official, whose job was “to make the Germans do things for themselves and learn that they can’t call on us for ever.” To quote a review of the film in July 1948, in the magazine 'Film Sponsor':

“Necessarily we have only brief glimpses of his day, and of the difficult problems with which he must cope. But within its tiny limits the film does manage to convey something of life over there, its difficulties, hungers and sorrows.

One of its great assets is the officer himself, a middle-aged unmilitary type with a manner at the same time gentle and authoritative.”

The film opens by scanning across a townscape of ruins and empty shells of houses. We then see, coming in to the picture, a young barefoot boy pulling a handcart through the ruins, rifling through the rubbish in a dustbin, picking out an old discarded leather shoe and trying it for size, while the narrator says:

“This is the British Zone of Germany in the Autumn of 1947.

In 1939 this was a prosperous country town. Today fifty percent of the houses are in ruins. Even so, forty thousand people are still living here. Scenes likes these are familiar to everyone like myself, working in the Control Commission for Germany.
….

Life is hard for the Germans. Food is scarce and the people are hungry. They may have to queue for hours only to find that supplies have run out. The Bürgermeister – in England we would call him the mayor – has to listen to all the complaints and grouses – and he passes them on to me.  If they concern us, I take them up with the British authorities for immediate action.”

One of the biggest problems in the town was finding accommodation for refugees. The town council had done all they could to find room, but there were still ten thousand people living in the town in overcrowded cellars. The K.R.O. had to take a firm line and say that although he sympathised with the Bürgermeister “… if he did not do something more, then the Council would have to elect a new Bürgermeister. I insisted that he must find accommodation for the refugees before winter …”
 
According to the film, the refugees were either “prisoners of war who have been released” or “civilians who have been uprooted by the war, and swept into distant parts of Germany” now returning home. This was the only time the film made the point (which was stressed several times in A Defeated People) that the German people brought all this upon themselves. To a close-up picture of a man with one leg, walking on crutches, the narrator says: “This is the price that Germany is having to pay for waging war.”

Interestingly there was no mention in the film of the real reason for the large numbers of refugees in the British Zone of Germany after the war – the expulsion of an estimated 12 million ethnic Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia, around 7 million of whom reached the Western zones of Germany by 1949, forming an average of around 16% of the total population, but more, up to 33% or higher in rural areas. The German refugee crisis had been a controversial topic in Britain and the subject of a high profile campaign in 1945 and 1946 by, among others, the publisher Victor Gollancz.

The film showed the K.R.O. visiting around 300 refugees, all living together in temporary accommodation in an open hall, sympathising with them, offering one man a cigarette because he felt sorry for him, and commenting:

“I find it a sad and rather terrible sight, to see all these men, women and children living like animals in the straw. But at least they have a place where they can rest.”
 
After visiting a school, to make sure the children had enough to eat, a factory, where the machinery had been standing idle since 1939 but which would soon be working again, and a farm where he found the farmer had a big house which could accommodate some more refugees, the K.R.O. returned home to his office, to complete his paperwork and report for his superiors. Finally, late in the evening, he had a call from the local police chief, who had received reports of three black marketeers raiding a farm and wanted the K.R.O. to go out with him to back him up.

The film ended with the K.R.O saying, to a picture of him and the German police officer walking down the road together in the dark:

“The Kreis Resident officer has a very important job in Germany today. He is the man on the ground. He has to see that our plans for making Germany work again are carried out … and that the Germans do the job properly.”
 

The film K.R.O. Germany, directed by Graham Wallace and produced by the Crown Film Unit, is held in the archives of the British Film Institute. I would like to thank BFI staff for locating the film and providing viewing facilities at the BFI Library in London.

Justum et tenacem propositi virum – the wise man, firm of purpose

26th October 2008

With the start of a new academic term, I’ve restarted posting on this blog, which aims to record my thoughts, ideas, and, I hope, some insights and discoveries, as I work my way through a six year, part time PhD project, on the British in Occupied Germany after World War Two. The approach I’ve adopted, for the time being at least, is to ‘Follow the People’. I’ve identified around 20 people I think are interesting for one reason or another, and am trying to find out as much about them as I can.

In my last post, I referred to General Sir Brian Robertson, Deputy Military Governor of the British Zone of Occupation, writing in January 1946, at the end of an article in the British Zone Review, the official journal of British Military Government and the Control Commission for Germany, that he and his colleagues in the British Control Commission should take as their motto “a line written many centuries ago by wise friend Horace:”

Justum et tenacem propositi virum

During a recent visit to the archives at the Imperial War Museum, I was surprised to find Robertson saying the same thing two years later, this time to journalists at a press conference on 22nd December 1947:

“I remember when I first came to Germany, somewhat to the alarm of the staff I asked them to refresh their memories about the opening lines of the ode by the poet Horace which began:

‘Justum et tenacem propositi virum’

If you want to know what I think should be our attitude in Germany then I recommend to you to read those lines yourselves.”

As I said then, this quotation brought home to me just how much has changed in the last sixty years. Could you imagine a modern British (or American, or French or German or Italian) Commander-in-Chief quoting the first line of a Latin ode, not only to his staff, but to journalists at a press conference, and expect his readers and listeners to know and understand the rest of the poem?

The full quotation from Horace can be translated as:

“The just man, firm of purpose cannot be shaken in his rocklike soul, by the heat of fellow citizens clamouring for what is wrong, nor by the presence of a threatening tyrant.”

What can this tell us about the British in Germany after the war, who they were and what they aimed to achieve?

The just man firm of purpose, presumably, is the British officer in the Control Commission and Military Government. The fellow citizens clamouring for what is wrong and trying to shake him in his rock-like soul would appear to be their critics at home in the UK, in the press, in parliament, maybe even in the British government. The threatening tyrant could be Stalin, or could be the shadow of Hitler, or both.

Firstly, it seems to me, this reveals the supreme self-confidence of many of the British. Winning the war had demonstrated not only their physical, but also their moral superiority and, in their view, the superiority of the British way of life, government and society in general. As Michael Balfour, another general in the war and administrator in occupied Germany afterwards, said in the introduction to his history of the period, the book was written “from the standpoint of a British liberal democrat, to whom the political forms evolved in Britain and America seem the most satisfactory yet devised by man…”

Secondly, the audience Robertson was addressing was middle and upper class, educated men like himself, who, whether they were now army officers, civil administrators or journalists in the press, had all learnt their Latin at British public (ie private) schools. Because they shared the same upbringing and education, Robertson could assume, rightly or wrongly, that these men knew what was right, without having to be told.

Thirdly, by drawing on a classical tradition that was not unique to Britain, he could open the way to a common understanding with people in Germany who shared, or appeared to share, the same tradition. The first step towards reconciliation is to emphasise what people have in common, rather than what keeps them apart.

And fourthly, after the end of the war, the dangers against which the British officer – the just man, firm of purpose – had to guard, would appear to come, in his view, not so much from resistance or opposition from the German people, but from fellow citizens at home, who failed to understand the importance of the task and what he and his colleagues were trying to achieve, and from the threat of tyranny, represented on the one hand by a possible revival of German nationalism and on the other by the threat of Communism.

In practice, official British policy, as determined by the politicians in Westminster and the civil servants in Whitehall, came to be governed by concerns as to the cost of the occupation to the British taxpayer, and a desire to hand back responsibility for all aspects of government to German people as quickly as possible. The tensions between high and noble objectives, expressed by General Sir Brian Robertson and many other British officers and administrators in Germany, and the mundane practical concerns of those at home, is something that, to my mind, makes this a fascinating subject to study.

How three British army offices reacted to the transition from war to peace in Germany, 1945

28th June 2008


Last Friday, June 27th, I gave a paper at the History Lab 2008 postgraduate conference on ‘Turning Points.’ The conference, as usual, was very well organised, with papers on a wide range of subjects, from (to give just two examples) the adoption of tungsten carbide cutting tools in Britain in the interwar years, to Parliamentary legislation affecting women. My own paper was on: ‘The only really worth while thing he ever did in his life.’ How three British army officers reacted to the transition from war to peace in Germany, 1945.


I started by quoting Brigadier F S V Donnison, the author of the relevant volume of the British official history of the Second World War Civil Affairs and Military Government. North-West Europe 1944-1946, who concluded the book with a “personal impression” based on discussions with many of the regular officers he spoke to during the course of his work. Although at first they disliked a posting to Civil Affairs, many “made it very clear to the writer that by the time their connection with military government was to be severed, they had come to feel it was the most rewarding work they had ever undertaken. One even said it was ‘the only really worth while thing he ever did in his life.'”


The question I tried to answer was why did three senior British army officers react to the end of the war the way they did – by working energetically to rebuild and restore a country they had previously been doing their best to destroy? The examples I chose were three people I’ve written about before on this blog, Field Marshal Montgomery, commander-in chief of British forces at the end of the war and the first Military Governor, his deputy, General Sir Brian Robertson, who was himself appointed Military Governor in 1947, and General Sir Alec Bishop, who, as head of the Public Relations and Information Services Control division for the first year after the end of the war, was responsible for how British Military Government presented itself to the outside world.


I must say that, even after working on the paper, I’m not sure I really understand the answer to this question. In part it was their sense of shock at the chaos they found in Germany after the war, in part the lack of any clear guidance from the British government at home, to tell them what to do, and in part their own personal upbringing and previous experience, which led them to assume, without question, that it was their duty to try to restore law and order, to implement the policies of disarmament and denazification agreed by the four Allies at Potsdam, but also, in Montgomery’s words, to help the defeated enemy to “find his own salvation”, or as Robertson said, in an oral history interview with the Truman presidential library, to fight “a battle over the soul of Germany.”


There seemed to be a clear link, for some officers, between their earlier experience in the British Empire, and their attitude to Germany. Bishop, for example, spent the whole of his working life, in his words “in the service of the British Empire”. I quoted him saying in his, unpublished, memoirs, written in 1971:


“Many of the people in Britain and in other countries who take a delight in condemning the period of British Colonial rule in Africa and Asia had no part in its creation and administration, nor did they experience the devotion and idealism of the British administrators. I feel no doubt that when an authoritative history of our Colonial Empire comes to be written, the part played by the British officials who administered it in establishing and maintaining law and order, in holding the interests of the people above all else and in educating and preparing them to run their own affairs in due course will become fully evident.”


Here he was speaking of the Empire, but this is exactly what these British officers set out to do and believed they were doing in Germany after the war: establishing and maintaining law and order, holding the interest of the people above all else, and preparing them to run their own affairs in due course.


At the end of my paper, I quoted an article written by Robertson in the British Zone Review, the official journal of British Military Government and the Control Commission for Germany, to try to illustrate what seemed to me to be the ‘missionary idealism’ of some of these officers. Here is an extract from the article:


“‘First things first’ was the motto when Military Government first raised its sign in Germany… ‘Give me that gun Fritz’ – ‘Put that man behind the wire.’ – ‘Clear the rubble.’ – ‘Mend the drains.’ – ‘Get some roads open, some railways running.’ – ‘Food? Yes we will get you some food but tighten your belt.’ – ‘Pull yourself together, man. You look bomb happy.’ – ‘Get your roof mended.’ – ‘There is a school open down the road. Send that boy to school.’


Have we done these things well, these first urgent things? That is for others to say. Let others praise, let others carp. We are too busy. There is so much to be done. We have a mission.”


Robertson continued by asking “What are we to do with Germany”. He offered no specific answers, but did say, to his colleagues reading the article:


“Our responsibilities in the search for these answers are immense. We shall have many difficulties, many disappointments, many critics. Let us take as our motto a line written many centuries ago by wise friend Horace:


Justum et tenacem propositi virum


And if you know the rest of the poem, or if your Latin is still able to translate it, you will find that Horace wrote that Ode specially for the Control Commission in Germany.”


I asked the audience at the conference if anyone recognised this quotation, or knew the rest of the poem, or was able to translate the original Latin. Not surprisingly, no one did. I didn’t either, of course, but I had previously looked up the full quotation in my Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, (you can also find it on the web), and this is one translation:


“The just man, firm of purpose cannot be shaken in his rocklike soul, by the heat of fellow citizens clamouring for what is wrong, nor by the presence of a threatening tyrant.”


The just man firm of purpose, presumably, is the British officer in the Control Commission and Military Government. The fellow citizens clamouring for what is wrong and trying to shake him in his rock-like soul, must be their critics at home, in the press, maybe in parliament, maybe even in the British government. The threatening tyrant – I don’t know – could be Stalin, or could be the shadow of Hitler, or both.


This quotation, from Horace, brought home to me just how much has changed in the last sixty years. This is not all that long ago, and there are many people alive today who lived through those times. But could you imagine a modern British (or American, or French or German or Italian) Commander-in-Chief quoting the first line of a Latin ode, as a motto for his troops and expect his readers to know the rest of the poem and be able to translate it?

More on Major General Sir Alec Bishop

19th May 2008

Last week I wrote about Major General Sir Alec Bishop and quoted some extracts from his unpublished memoirs Look Back with Pleasure which he wrote in 1971, and which are held, together with other personal papers, in the archives of the Imperial War Museum.

It is intriguing how, when the war was over, career officers, such as General Bishop, approached their work of civil administration, in a country whose people they had fought against for years and defeated in battle.

Some, such as Field Marshal Montgomery, the first Military Governor of the British Zone of Occupation in Germany, appeared to relish the task, whilst others, such as the second Military Governor, Marshal of the Royal Air Force, Sir Sholto Douglas, appeared to be deeply unhappy with it. Douglas, for example relates in his memoirs that it was "the unhappiest period of my entire official life" and towards the end of his year in office, in the summer of 1947, he "found all too often that the questions that came to my mind about what we were doing appeared to be insoluble … I found myself wondering quite often why I, an Air Force officer, should be trying to solve problems which should have been in the hands of the politicians."

Alec Bishop appeared to have no such doubts as to the ability to army officers to manage the tasks of civilian administration and was critical of the civilians who followed them. He related in his memoirs how:

"In the early days of the Occupation, the Services had, as already mentioned, entered whole heartedly into the tasks of helping the Germans to reconstruct their shattered and chaotic economy, and to build up a democratically elected system of government. The Labour Government which came to office in Britain after the 1945 election found it at first difficult to believe that Army officers would be capable of, or even interested in helping the Germans in such tasks as the reconstruction of political parties and trade unions, and underestimated the strong desire of those who had fought during the five years of war to turn to constructive work. It was therefore decided by the politicians that Military Government should be ‘civilianised’ as rapidly as possible. The speed with which this was carried out hampered the contribution which Britain was making to the reconstruction of German life."

According to Bishop, it was difficult to recruit suitably qualified staff to work in the civilian Control Commission:

"One outcome of the recruitment difficulties was that some of those who were appointed to the Control Commission were not suitable or qualified to fulfil the responsibilities entrusted to them"

With his strong commitment to the British Empire, he added: "If more of the highly experienced members of the I.C.S. [Indian Civil Service] who were retiring from India at that time could have been invited to come and serve for a spell with us in Germany, it would have solved many of our problems."

I wonder if he knew of an ironic comment attributed to Kurt Schumacher, the leader of the German Social Democratic Party, referring to the tendency of some of the British to treat Germany as if it were part of the British Empire, that "the only thing he regretted about India getting back its independence was that, no doubt, all the Indian Civil Service would turn up in Germany."

One of the most remarkable stories Bishop told occurred later, in June 1949, when he was regional commissioner for the heavily industrialised area of North Rhine Westphalia, and had to carry out the British policy of dismantling German factories in order to pay reparations to the Allies. The dismantling of weapons factories was not in dispute, but as Bishop said: "…the inclusion of plant which were not designed for the production of armaments aroused the most violent reaction from all sections of the German population."

In his memoirs he wrote that the crisis came to a head in June 1949, with opposition by workers to the dismantling of synthetic oil plants at Bergkamen and Dortmund. The troops responsible for maintaining security in these areas were Belgian, (though under Bishop’s command as Regional Commissioner), and were placed on alert.

Bishop decided to appeal directly to the German population and make a statement to be broadcast on the radio. In the statement, he said that the dismantling decision had been taken jointly by the American, British and French governments, and further resistance would result in the use of force, which he hoped and prayed would be unnecessary.

He told the same story, in more vivid terms than those he had used in his memoirs, in a BBC TV programme first broadcast in November 1981, not long before he died on 15th May 1984. (Zone of Occupation: Germany under the British, programme 4, Make Germany Pay). More recently, in September 2005, the same material was used in a BBC Radio programme introduced by Charles Wheeler (Germany: Misery to Miracle). In the programme, Alec Bishop could be heard saying:

"I thought that it was almost certain that force would have to be used, in other words that some of them would have to be shot. So I went to the Cologne broadcasting station and said I wished to take over broadcasting straight away and broadcast a message, which I did. In this message I said that I understood their feelings, but that if they insisted in opposing this by force, which had been ordained by the four allies, there was no doubt that they would get hurt and I said that there are other ways of dealing with this than using force. And I promise you if you will let up on this that I will do everything I can to find you alternative work  And I said finally: don’t you think  (in a voice still shaking with emotion) that you’ve killed enough of us, and we’ve killed enough of you during the war. And they called it off."

Major General Sir Alec Bishop

12th May 2008

Major General Sir Alec Bishop was one of the most senior British officers in Germany after the war. I’ve recently read his unpublished memoirs Look back with Pleasure which he wrote in 1971, and which are held, together with other personal papers, in the archives of the Imperial War Museum.

General Bishop was posted to Germany in June 1945, one month after the end of the war, and left five and a half years later on New Year’s Eve 1950, which makes him one of the longer serving senior officers. His first position was head of the ‘Public Relations and Information Services Control’ division of  British Military Government, generally known by its acronym, PRISC. In 1946 he was appointed Deputy Chief of Staff to Sir Brian Robertson, then Deputy Military Governor, and from 1948 – 1950 he was Regional Commissioner for North Rhine Westphalia, by far the largest Land, or region, in the British Zone of Occupation.

His memoirs are easy to read with a wealth of interesting stories and anecdotes, which reinforce many of the themes I’ve written about in this blog. There are also a few surprises.

The first thing that surprised me was that nothing in his earlier life, as a career soldier, would appear to have prepared him for his role in Germany after the war, but it was a job he performed diligently and, apparently, with pleasure.

He was born in 1897, and so would have been 48 years old when he first went to Germany. In the preface to his memoirs, dated November 1971, he places himself firmly in the tradition of the British Empire:

"This book is about a life mostly spent in the service of the British Empire. Although it is fashionable at the present time to decry this period of our history, the author hopes that his story may make some contribution towards a better understanding of our successes and failures, and of the joys and sorrows which came our way." 

At the age of 12 his father gave him a copy of Baden Powell’s book Scouting for Boys and he wrote that this book "excited my imagination, and I set about forming a Boy Scout Patrol among the other village boys, making myself, of course, the Patrol Leader!"

His father had not served in the army, (except as a local volunteer during the First World War), but "most of my forbears on my Mother’s side had been soldiers" dating back to the "Parliamentary Wars of the seventeenth century," and it was assumed that he too "would follow the profession of arms."

He gained a scholarship to Sandhurst in the autumn of 1914 and two years later was posted to Mesopotamia, (as Iraq was then known, at a time when it was still part of the Turkish empire), in charge of a company of 500 men. He wrote that the main reason the British were there was "to safeguard the supply of oil from the Persian oilfields."

In January 1917 he took part in the offensive which was to lead to the capture of Baghdad on 17th March. Shortly after he was lightly wounded in action, after a engagement in which the company commander was killed and he took over command. After three weeks in hospital he re-joined his regiment and again took over command of the company, still only 19 years old. By the end of the war, in November 1918, he had taken part in the defeat of the Turkish troops by the British army under General Allenby and fought his way through Palestine to Damascus.

Between the wars he spent some time in India and then became a staff officer in the Colonial Office in London, working for the Inspector General of the African Colonial Forces. During this time he travelled extensively in Africa, inspecting the troops, and summed up his time there as follows: "many of the people in Britain and in other countries who take a delight in condemning the period of British Colonial rule in Africa and Asia had no part in its creation and administration, nor did they experience the devotion and idealism of the British administrators. I feel no doubt that when an authoritative history of our Colonial Empire comes to be written, the part played by the British officials who administered it in establishing and maintaining law and order, in holding the interests of the people above all else and in educating and preparing them to run their own affairs in due course will become fully evident."

At the outbreak of the Second World War he was in Tanganyika, where he organised the arrest of German settlers, which was done in response to concerns they would "form themselves into commandos and take to the bush." He spent the rest of the war in various positions, both in Africa and as a staff officer at the War Office in London. For the last three months of the war, he was Deputy Director of the Political Warfare Executive, (PWE), deputising for the director, Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, who was ill at the time. Presumably it was this which led to him taking charge of Information Services in Germany. Apparently he had no choice in the matter, as his appointment was negotiated between his boss, Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, and Sir William Strang, political adviser to the Military Governor, Field Marshal Montgomery.

I’ve written elsewhere in this blog about the First Impressions of Germany after the war, of other British officers, diplomats, administrators and journalists. General Bishop writes in very similar terms:

Firstly shock at the scale of the devastation he found in Germany:

"It is very difficult for anyone who did not see the situation in Germany when the war came to an end to realise what it was like. The first impression was of the appalling destruction which had been caused by the Allies’ bombing. Very few towns had escaped wide-spread destruction. In some of the Ruhr towns such as Duisburg, over eighty per cent of the buildings had been reduced to rubble, under which lay the bodies of thousands of casualties. Water mains and sewers were disrupted, the main railway and road bridges destroyed, and those who remained alive were sheltering in the cellars under the ruins. Even those factories and mines which had escaped destruction were closed. All normal movement and civilised living had been brought to a standstill. To add to the confusion, bands of released prisoners of war and displaced person who had been brought to Germany to provide labour for the factories and farms were roaming the countryside in search of food, and sometimes to pay off old scores. The machinery of Government and of Police at all levels had collapsed. The situation was summed up by Mr Ernest Bevin, then British Foreign Secretary, in a speech he made in the House of Commons in July, 1945 when he described Germany as ‘without law, without a Constitution, without a single person with whom we could deal, without a singe institution to grapple with the situation."

Secondly, the unquestioned assumption that something had to be done about this, both to help the German people, and because this was in Britain’s own self-interest, to prevent the spread of both disease, and communism.

(I wonder how general this fear of communism was immediately after the end of the war in May and June 1945, and to what extent General Bishop was projecting back accepted wisdom at the time he was writing his memoirs in 1971, after years of the Cold War).

"No one who saw this situation could doubt that drastic measures would have to be taken by the Occupying Forces to help the German people to deal with it. Without vigorous help and support it was inevitable that epidemics would spread throughout the country, endangering the health of the Occupying Forces and of the whole of Western Europe. It was also clear that unless the German people were helped to transform the conditions then existing into a situation which would provide a bearable if modest standard of living it would be impossible to prevent the spread of communism throughout the whole country."

Thirdly, how difficult he felt it was, for those who were not there in person, to understand what conditions in Germany at the end of the war were really like:

"In the light of the ‘economic miracle’ which subsequently occurred in Western Germany, the situation described above must seem to belong to an age of fantasy; it was however very real in 1945."

And, finally, the remarkable way in which, according to Major Bishop, the British army changed from fighting the enemy one day, to helping the same people with the task of reconstruction the next:

"Our mainstay in those early days was the British Army of occupation, which had so recently been devoting all its energies to the defeat and destruction of the enemy, and now turned with an equal enthusiasm from the destruction of war to the reconstruction of peace. Commanders and men alike worked with great energy and enthusiasm at every task of reconstruction which came to their hand."

Goronwy Rees on Weimar Germany

3rd May 2008

Goronwy Rees, the writer, journalist, academic, company director and spy (see previous posts on this blog) was a senior British officer in Germany for a short period after the end of the war. Two weeks ago ago, I wrote about a six day tour which he and Sir William Strang, political advisor to the Military Governor, Field-Marshal Montgomery, made through the British Zone of Germany in late June or early July 1945, in which he described in graphic terms the conditions they found there.

I’ve started to realise that the complex and often contradictory attitudes of the British in Germany to their former enemy, depended as much on the prejudices and preconceptions they brought with them, based on their own previous experiences during and before the war, as on what they found on the ground when they got there.

Goronwy Rees knew Germany well. After the war he wrote a number of articles about his visits there in the 1930s. "Innocent Abroad" described a holiday job teaching English to the son of a Silesian aristocrat, during the Summer vacation of 1929 while he was still a student at Oxford; "A Winter in Berlin" described an extended visit he made to Berlin in 1934, to pursue his research into Ferdinand Lassalle, the founder of the German Social Democratic Party; and "Berlin in the Twenties" was a review of a book, Before the Deluge: A portrait of Berlin in the 1920s by Otto Friedrich. (References at the end of this posting).

Taken together, these articles help explain the attraction of Weimar Germany for a generation of young British left-wing intellectuals, reacting against the stuffiness and complacency of the British political and social establishment, and the disillusionment they felt when this Brave New World was replaced by the nationalist violence of Nazi Germany, followed by the chaos and disaster of war. As Rees wrote at the start of "Innocent Abroad" first published in 1956:

"It is hard now, nearly thirty years later, to explain even to myself the kind of attraction which Germany exerted on young men of my generation at Oxford. The image of Germany which we found so seductive has been irretrievable shattered by the events of the last twenty-five years; at the most a few scattered splinters are left, like the shards and fragments from which an archaeologist tries to reconstruct a lost civilisation. To try to recover the original image of Weimar Germany by which I, and so many others, were attracted is like trying to restore some lost masterpiece which has been painted over by a succession of brutal and clumsy artists; and in this case the task is all the harder because the masterpiece never really existed and the Germany of Weimar in which we believed was really only a country of the imagination."

What was it they found so attractive? In part, it was sympathy for the defeated country, arising from their own political reaction against what was, in their view, the senseless destruction of the First World War. In part it was an idealistic belief, shared by many at the time, that an international working-class movement was the strongest bulwark against another war, caused by the selfish interests of different nations and their governments, greedy for power. At that time, before Hitler came to power, the working class movement was stronger in Germany than in any other country in Western Europe, including Britain. As Rees wrote: "For the real bulwark of peace was not the League [of Nations] but the international working-class movement, and was not Germany, with its massive trade union and social democratic organisations, the strongest representative of that movement?"

The attraction of Weimar Germany, for Rees and others like him, lay also in its culture and society representing, so they thought, the opposite of everything they disliked about conventional life at home. "In saying this, of course, we were expressing our feelings just as much about our own country as about her defeated enemy. To sympathise with Germany was a mark of our violent revulsion against the Great War and its consequences, and against the generation which had helped to make it and to conduct it to victory. Germany was for us at the opposite extreme from everything we disliked in the land of our fathers; Germany indeed had done her best to kill our fathers, and we were not ungrateful to her for her efforts and sympathised with her failure…"

"For politics were only a part of our infatuation with Germany. Weimar also represented to us all those experiments, in literature, in the theatre, in music, in education, and not least in sexual morals, which we would have liked to attempt in our own country but were so patently impossible in face of the massive and infuriating stupidity of the British middle classes."

But all was not as it seemed. As Rees told the story in "Innocent Abroad", instead of experiencing the delights of Berlin, he found himself staying on a country estate near Breslau, in Silesia, in the middle of a boundless "golden ocean of corn," where his employer was a German baron. The family were kind to him, treating him as if he were an English country gentleman and therefore (more or less) one of themselves, but their outlook on life was totally different from his own, looking forward to a time when another war would return to Germany the lands lost at the end of the First World War in the Treaty of Versailles. The baron’s son, Fritz, "was a charming companion and friend, and I was puzzled that I should find him none the less so even though most of his ideas and beliefs were to me both fantastic and repellent."

In "A Winter in Berlin", time had moved on. By 1934, to visit Berlin was, according to Rees, "in intellectual circles, an unfashionable thing to do, because Hitler had already been in power for a year, and in that short time had totally destroyed the culture which had made Berlin as irresistibly attractive to enlightened young men, particularly English ones, as Rome is to Catholics or Mecca to Muslims."

"The suppression of all organs of opposition had deprived the vast majority of Germans of any means of making an objective assessment of what was happening to themselves or to their country. No one who has never experienced it can quite understand the sense of helplessness and apathy which affects a people which is denied access to any source of information except that which is officially approved."

Rees provided pen-pictures of a number of people he met in Berlin in 1934, some young aristocrats, others supporters of the once powerful Social Democratic Party, but all of them survivors of a lost world, who still believed that Hitler could not last for long and who "could not realize or accept the magnitude or finality of their defeat."

An anonymous friend of his had set up a small hand printing press "on which he and others printed pamphlets and broadsheets denouncing the Hitler regime". Rees supplied him with material for his leaflets and copies of English papers "for what he and his friends wanted most was to feel that there, in Berlin, they were not totally isolated in their struggle, that somewhere, in another world, there were forces at work which would come to their aid, that they were not alone in trying to fight Hitler but were encompassed by a cloud of witnesses to the significance of what they were trying to do. In all this they were of course quite wrong; no one knew of their existence or their efforts, much less came to their assistance."

"Those who actively opposed Hitler were not only a tiny minority; they were a defeated and dispirited minority, living, in the middle of industrial Berlin, like castaways on some desert island with only their hopes and their dreams to sustain them. It was impossible to believe that they would ever feel the touch of victory."

"As the long winter drew on and gave way to spring, it became increasingly clear that, whatever happened to Hitler’s regime, it would not fall as the result of any opposition from inside Germany itself, and with this realization I fell victim to a profound depression, as if for the first time I had really grasped the full horror of what had happened to Germany."

"I never saw my friends of that winter again but when I next returned to Berlin, in 1945, there were none of them left. In the years between I thought of them often, and always with affection, but the memory brought no happiness with it, as unconsciously I already thought of them as if they were dead."

In the third article, "Berlin in the Twenties" written in 1972, Rees "wondered at the fascination which Germany, and Berlin, of the 1920s still exerts both on those who preserve nostalgic memories of them and on the young, for whom the tragic story of the Weimar Republic has become a kind of pantomime," as shown by the success, both in the US and Europe, of the musical Cabaret, based on Christopher Isherwood’s book Goodbye to Berlin. He continued by asking why Weimar Germany also continued to cast its spell on serious historians. "For Weimar really presents us with at least two quite different kinds of problem. One is the difficulty of understanding how and why a great and civilised country like Germany surrendered itself to the boa-constrictor embrace of a mountebank genius like Adolf Hitler. The other is why a period which began with the total defeat of Germany in World War I and ended in the even great defeat implicit, from a cultural point of view, in the triumph of Hitler, should have coincided with a brilliant flowering of literary and artistic activity, so that in some aspects it seems to look like a glittering cultural Renaissance rather than a spectacle of the decline and fall of a great people."

It’s not for me to attempt to answer these questions. My research is on the British in Germany after the war, not Weimar Germany and the rise of Hitler. For me, what is interesting is what all this can tell us about the British in Germany, as victors in war and occupiers of a defeated country.

In my first post on Goronwy Rees, I said I could not understand why, in his preface to the book Der Fragebogen by Ernst von Salomon, he felt he needed to warn English readers not to be deceived by the book, because it was written by a very "gifted writer". It now seems to me that underlying the extracts I’ve quoted in this posting was the suspicion, the fear even, that what happened in Germany in the 1930s could also happen at home. That if one "great and civilised country like Germany" could be deceived by Adolf Hitler, so too could other great countries like Britain, or the United States. That if Goronwy Rees and others like him were attracted  to Weimar Germany, but were powerless to prevent the rise of Hitler, they would be equally powerless to prevent the rise of another Hitler, or someone like him, at home.

As I wrote then, it was not only Weimar Germany which had attracted Goronwy Rees. In the 1930s, inspired by his opposition to fascism and dislike for the British establishment, he had also been a communist, and for brief period, a member of the spy ring working for the Soviet Union, of which the leading members were the "Cambridge Five": Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross. Perhaps, by the time he wrote these articles in the 1950s and 1960s, (by which time he had become a firm, anti-communist, member of the British literary establishment), Rees felt he personally had been deceived, by his attraction to Weimar Germany, by Stalin’s communism, and by his own friends Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt, in much the same way that people in Germany had been deceived by Hitler’s national socialism.

In an oral history interview for the Truman Presidential Library, General Sir Brian Robertson, the most senior and influential British officer in Germany during the occupation, said: "The truth of the matter was that in those early days we were fighting a battle over the soul of Germany."

Perhaps Goronwy Rees and others like him at the end of the war and afterwards, felt they had to fight not only for the soul of Germany, but also, in one way or another, for their own.

References

"Innocent Abroad" and "A Winter in Berlin" are included in:
Goronwy Rees: Sketches in Autobiography: ‘A Bundle of Sensations’ and ‘A Chapter of Accidents’ with ‘A Winter in Berlin’, a further autobiographical essay. (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2001). Edited with Introduction and Notes by John Harris

"Berlin in the Twenties" is included in:
Goronwy Rees: Brief Encounters (London: Chatto & Windus, 1974)

Goronwy Rees on Field-Marshal Montgomery

27th April 2008

As I described in my posting on 20th January, the approach I have adopted for my research on "’Winning the Peace’: The British in occupied Germany, 1945-1951" is to ‘Follow the People.’ One of the people I’m following is Field-Marshal Bernard Montgomery, Military Governor of the British Zone of Germany during the first twelve months after the end of the war, and better known, of course, as the victor of the battle of El Alamein.

In the two previous posts on this blog, I’ve written about Goronwy Rees, another person I’m following, who was, among many other things, a british army intelligence officer in Germany for six months after the end of war. One of the chapters in his book of autobiographical sketches A Bundle of Sensations, describing his part in the Dieppe Raid in 1942, includes a portrait of Montgomery which apparently attracted a great deal of attention at the time it was first published, nearly fifty years ago.

Although this episode took place during rather than after the war, and is therefore outside my own period of research, I still think it’s worth covering here, as an introduction to writing more about Montgomery and his time in Germany in future postings.

Rees starts by describing how, when he was serving as an intelligence officer in the Home Forces in London, the brigadier told him he would be transferred to HQ South Eastern Command and this meant he would be on General Montgomery’s staff:

"’He’s a bit of a terror, you know’, the brigadier said. "’Very keen on physical fitness, and all that. Makes all his staff officers do a five-mile run once a week’. He spoke as if it were an affront to the human race and gave a little shiver of distaste."

At first Rees saw nothing of Montgomery until one day an ADC told him he was to report personally to the Army Commander at 8.15pm, after dinner.

When he arrived at the "comfortable villa" near Reigate where Montgomery had his quarters, he was shown into a room. "Through the open French windows I could see a small, rather unimpressive figure walking on the lawn, head slightly bent and hands clasped behind his back."

When Montgomery entered the room, Rees described him as follows: "One saw a narrow foxy face, long-nosed, sharp and intelligent and tenacious, with very bright and clear blue eyes, and a small, light, spare body … but what was impressive was an air he had of extraordinary quietness and calm, as if nothing in the world could disturb his peace of mind … And to my surprise, after experience of many senior officers, though none so exalted as him, he was extremely polite, so that one almost forgot his rank …"

"And as one talked to him, one was aware all the time of the stillness and quietness that reigned all around him, in the study itself, in the entire household, in the garden outside, as if even the birds were under a spell of silence; it was a kind of stillness one would associate more easily with an interview with a priest than a general."

The notes to my copy of A Bundle of Sensations (edited by John Harris) add at this point that: "Reviewers of A Bundle of Sensations were much taken by Rees’ pages on Monty and Nigel Hamilton [Montgomery’s biographer] agrees: ‘Anyone who ever served or worked with Montgomery will testify to the accuracy of this portrait.’"

The next morning Rees was called to see Montgomery again and was told he was to act as his representative on the ‘Combined Operations’ group planning the Dieppe Raid. Since Montgomery "was formally responsible for the operation, it would be necessary for him to be kept informed of the progress of planning and training, of any needs or difficulties that might arise, or any decision taken that might require his approval."

During the following weeks, after the frantic activity at the Combined Operations headquarters, Rees wrote how different things seemed when he went to Reigate to report to Montgomery:

"It was never difficult to see him; when an appointment was made, he was always punctually available, and he always gave the impression that he had nothing in the world to do except the business which was in hand … Most remarkable of all, to myself, was that he actually listened to what I said, gravely and politely, though very often I felt it was not worth listening to; and when he made comments, or issued any instructions, one felt that they had already been considered, calmly and dispassionately, in the cool of the evening in the garden, when he had given himself just the right amount of time required for reflection."

The day before it was due to take place, there was a gale and the expedition was cancelled due to unfavourable weather conditions. However, a decision was taken that the operation, now codenamed Jubilee, was to take place in a month’s time, but as a large number of Canadian forces were involved, overall responsibility was transferred from Montgomery to General McNaughton, the Canadian Commander in Chief. Rees was immediately recalled and took no further part in the planning. However a few days later he was told he could take part as an observer, which he did on board one of the escort ships, the destroyer Garth.

The aim of the raid was to capture the town, hold it for 12 hours, and then stage an orderly withdrawal. According to Rees, the operation was a disaster, there was no orderly retreat, and he described the condition of some of the survivors, picked up by his ship as they tried to escape from the beaches:

"…many were badly wounded, all were suffering from shock and exhaustion. They had the grey, lifeless faces of men whose vitality had been drained out of them; each of them could have modelled a death mask. They were bitter and resentful at having been flung into a battle far more horrible than anything for which they had been prepared… I thought that this is what a beaten army look like, for no army is beaten until it has lost faith and confidence in those who command it."

"Plans for Jubilee had not provided for withdrawal under such conditions as these; elaborate as they were, they had not taken complete failure into account. The wounded lay stretched out side by side on bunks and stretchers and hastily improvised beds, none of them wholly conscious, mumbling words of shock and pain, their faces drained of blood and each with a look in his eyes of dumb surprise, as if each had a question to ask which no one could answer."

The notes to A Bundle of Sensations say that this interpretation has been much debated and adds that Allied losses amounted to 4,350 (with 1,179 dead and 2,190 taken prisoner) German losses were 591, including 311 dead and missing. The Allies lost 106 aircraft and the Germans 48.

The subject of this posting is Rees’ portrait of Montgomery, not whether his description of the Dieppe Raid is correct or not, so I’ll finish this posting with three personal comments Rees describes Montgomery making on his fellow officers:

Firstly, a comment generally taken to refer to Admiral Mountbatten. Rees had told Montgomery it was sometimes difficult to discover what decisions had really been reached at Combined Operations HQ, and Montgomery added reflectively: "Yes, Admiral – , Admiral – , A very gallant sailor. A very gallant sailor. Had three ships sunk under him. Three ships sunk under him. (Pause) Doesn’t know how to fight a battle." 

Secondly, of another general who was, according to Rees, "exceedingly brave, exceedingly competent, with the charm and panache of a Renaissance condottiere" he [Montgomery] said: "General – ? Yes. General -. A very brave man. Killed three men with his bare hands. The man’s a brigand. Doesn’t know how to wage war."

These two comments illustrate Montgomery’s criticism of generals who, in his view, did not consider sufficiently the welfare of those who served under them, and who ignored the pain and suffering of war. According to Rees, who on his own admission idolised Montgomery at the time: "The Army Commander had a mind of classical directness and lucidity; when he talked of problems of war they seemed to assume an almost elementary simplicity, but this was only because of the strictness of the analysis which had been applied to them."

Third and lastly, Rees wrote how Montgomery could also be generous in praise of those of whom he approved, saying: "In later years, after he had won the victory of Alamein and had become famous, I often remembered his comment on General Alexander: ‘The only man, yes the only man, under whom any admiral, general, or air marshal would gladly serve in a subordinate position.’"

References

Goronwy Rees: Sketches in Autobiography: ‘A Bundle of Sensations’ and ‘A Chapter of Accidents’ with ‘A Winter in Berlin’, a further autobiographical essay. (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2001). Edited with Introduction and Notes by John Harris

A Bundle of Sensations was first published by Chatto & Windus, London, 1960

Two extracts from the chapter on the Dieppe Raid, ‘A Day at the Seaside’, were serialised in The Sunday Times on 22nd and 29th May 1960 as ‘Monty’ and the ‘Drama of Dieppe’.

Goronwy Rees and Sir William Strang’s six day tour of Germany in 1945

Last week I wrote about Goronowy Rees and his preface to the English translation of Der Fragebogen by Ernst von Salomon.

This week, I’m writing about his experiences as a British officer in Germany after the war, based on the chapter ‘Victory’ in his book of autobiographical sketches A Bundle of Sensations, first published in 1960.

Goronwy Rees was in Germany for six months from April to September 1945. He was a senior intelligence officer in the Political Division of Military Government, with the rank of Lt. Colonel, reporting to the Political Adviser, Sir William Strang.

Of particular interest was the account of a six day tour they made through the British Zone of Germany in late June or early July, in which Rees describes in graphic terms the conditions they found there. In many ways, it’s similar to the ‘First Impressions’ of other British officers, diplomats, administrators and journalists, which I’ve quoted in earlier postings. He writes about his shock at the scale of destruction, especially in the industrial cities of the Ruhr, which were now like "some landscape on the moon", and the extraordinary efforts of some British officers to help people whom, a few weeks earlier, before the war had ended, they had been doing their best to destroy.

There are also interesting comments on the peace and quiet of the German countryside, compared to the destruction in the cities, echoes of empire in the comparison of defeated Germany with "tropical Africa", and the life of luxury led by a British Corps commander at the ‘Schloss’ (or stately home) he had commandeered for his headquarters.  I’ve provided some extracts below.

I’ve also written about Strang before, so I was interested in what Rees had to say about him:

"I found him [Strang] in every way a surprising contrast to my idea of what a British diplomat should be like. The son of a farmer and educated at a grammar school and University College, London, he was entirely free of those mannerisms of speech and behaviour which are acquired at a public school and the older universities; he was modest and shy and diffident, irked by the grandeur imposed on him by his ambassadorial rank, and had a touching faith in my abilities as a soldier to overcome any difficulties which might meet us on our journey."

He also had an "immense capacity for work" and "corrected the drafts of messages and dispatches with a meticulousness that was very near to pedantry."

As Political Adviser to the Military Governor, Strang’s rank was equivalent to that of an ambassador. On the tour, he and Rees  travelled, driven by a chauffeur, in a large black Humber car, which had been specially prepared for the Political Adviser, until his Rolls Royce arrived from England.

At one point on the way from the spa town of Bad Oeynhausen, where the headquarters of the British Zone was located, to the industrial district of the Ruhr, they stopped for lunch, unpacked a hamper of food and wine, and sat down to eat and drink "in a rich green meadow, under the shade of a tree, on the banks of a smooth and clear stream. It was wonderfully quiet and peaceful and difficult to think of the problems of Germany; as he raised his glass of hock to his lips the Political Adviser  rather wistfully murmured: ‘Do you know, I’ve never done anything like this in my life.’"

But the outlook soon changed. As Rees wrote:

"But we were driving towards the Ruhr; we were soon out of the un-ravaged countryside and evidence began to collect of the consequences of war and defeat. I began to understand the man who said that war may be hell but defeat is worse. For in most of Germany at that time, and certainly in its industrial areas, it seemed true to say that even the most elementary conditions of civilised life had ceased to exist. Wherever the war had been, it had remorselessly ground to pieces the whole structure of organised society and all we could see around us was the ruin and rubble that remained." 

They were "like lost travellers painfully exploring some landscape of the moon. And all around us, at every turn, was the same monotonous repetitive vista of gap-toothed buildings, houses brutally torn apart, endless miles of fallen and broken buildings, and a few bent and solitary figures scratching in the ruins for anything that might be useful to them in the struggle to survive. It was a landscape as mournful and fantastic as those Piranesi drew of the ruins of ancient Rome, in which a few tiny human figures are dwarfed and overshadowed by the colossal fragments of a ruined world."

When they reached Düsseldorf, "the streets were totally deserted; in this dead city there was nothing any longer to support life, neither food nor water nor shelter nor heating and everyone who could leave had already left; only the rats still scuffled in the rubble."

They drove to the local [British] commander’s office where "We found the local commander at work among a litter of papers in his naked ground floor office; from his window he had a view, through the rain, of the ruins which constituted his empire. He was a lieutenant-colonel who only a short time ago had commanded a battalion which enthusiastically engaged in completing the final downfall of Germany; now, with equal enthusiasm, he was doing what he could to mitigate the effects of her defeat … By one of those magical transformations, like a scene in a pantomime, which occur in war, he now found himself the administrator and absolute ruler of an area containing over one million human beings who had suddenly been deprived of the means of existence. He might just as well have been dropped from the skies in the middle of tropical Africa and told to get on with the job of governing some primitive tribe living on the edge of starvation."

"Indeed he might have been better off, for there at least he would have found some form of tribal organisation through which he could have given his commands." But in Germany after the war, the complex structure of government had "… been swallowed in defeat. So far as local administration was concerned, the lieutenant-colonel might just as well have been operating in the desert, and to a more rational man the task in hand would have seemed so grotesque and futile as to be not worth attempting; but he was not a rational man, particularly because he seemed quite unaware of the irony of his endeavours to succour a people whom a short time ago he had been doing his best to destroy. When the Political Adviser suggested that there might be dangers in adopting so wholeheartedly the cause of our defeated enemies, he asked rather angrily whether it was the intention that they should be left to starve, or in winter to freeze, to death."

His only "obsessive interest in life" was how to bring enough coal into the city, without transport, so that Germans were able to work again.

"But the lieutenant-colonel also had another obsession as well as coal, without which the Germans, or what he sometimes referred to as ‘my people’ would also lack all the other means of subsistence."

"For his area, like other areas of Germany, was at that moment overrun by thousands of foreign workers, Frenchmen, Poles, Czechs, Russians, who had been the slaves of the Reich and now, suddenly released and at liberty, were determined both to keep themselves alive and take their revenge by plundering its corpse. At night the countryside was alive with bands of what were politely called ‘displaced persons’, who with considerable reason felt themselves entitled to pillage, plunder, rape, and murder with impunity; for what crimes could they possibly commit worse than the crimes which had been committed against them…."

The lieutenant-colonel solved this "moral dilemma" on the "simple principle that of all evils the complete absence of any form of law and order is the worst, worse even that the lack of the means of subsistence, and that his first task was to re-establish them."

The Political Adviser had little advice to give the local commander: "So he contented himself with saying that he would report the condition of affairs to London, and that he thought this might make some difference to those politicians who, following in the footsteps of Mr Morgenthau and Mr Noel Coward, still thought that the fundamental problem in German was how to be beastly enough to the Germans."

Rees and Strang left the local commander in Düsseldorf "… to find our way to the luxuries and comforts of a [British] Corps headquarters, where the Political Adviser was received with the lavish hospitality befitting his rank but so repugnant to his taste…. The Corps Commander was giving a very good imitation of a Renaissance prince enjoying the pleasures of his latest conquest, and was anxious to show that in him the exuberance of victory was refined by the discrimination of taste."

He lived in a "freshly furnished" stately home "… from which all traces of war had been effaced … it became almost impossible to believe in the dark picture painted for us in Düsseldorf, of a population not merely ruined but abandoned and betrayed and a country devastated and denuded and systematically pillaged by bands of brigands who would have been affronted by the mere suggestion that Germans could have any rights against themselves; indeed we might well have thought the local commander guilty of sentimentality or exaggeration if we had not heard the same account at every post we visited in the course of our journey."

References

Goronwy Rees: Sketches in Autobiography: ‘A Bundle of Sensations’ and ‘A Chapter of Accidents’ with ‘A Winter in Berlin’, a further autobiographical essay. (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2001). Edited with Introduction and Notes by John Harris

A Bundle of Sensations was first published by Chatto & Windus, London, 1960

Goronwy Rees and his preface to ‘Der Fragebogen’ by Ernst von Salomon

12th April 2008

In my posting on 20th January, I said the approach I intend to follow for my research on "’Winning the Peace’: The British in occupied Germany, 1945-1951" is to "Follow the People," and I provided a list of people who I think are interesting for one reason or another.

Some of them were senior British officers, such as the three Military Governors of the British occupied zone of Germany – Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Sholto Douglas and General Sir Brian Robertson.

Others were senior administrators and diplomats, such as Sir William Strang, Noel Annan, Sir Christopher Steel and Austen Albu, all of whom were political advisers to the Military Governors.

Many of these people are best known for what they did at other times; for example, Montgomery as the victor of the battle of El Alamein, or Noel Annan as chairman of the committee which produced what came to be known as the ‘Annan Report‘ on broadcasting. But it’s often surprising what their time in Germany can reveal both about them, and about British politics, culture and society in general.

Goronwy Rees was another senior British officer, and I think I’ll have to add him to my list of people to follow, for reasons I’ll try to explain in this post. He was in Germany for only a short time, for six months from April to September 1945, as a senior intelligence officer in the Political Division of Military Government, with the rank of Lt. Colonel, reporting to the Political Adviser, Sir William Strang. He was succeeded in this position by Noel Annan and for a short time they overlapped.

I first came across Goronwy Rees when I read the preface he wrote to the English translation of Der Fragebogen by Ernst von Salomon. I’ll write more about this another time, but suffice it to say that Der Fragebogen was a publishing sensation when it first appeared in Germany in 1951 and sold over 250,000 copies. Its author was a right-wing German nationalist who trained as a military cadet but was too young to fight in the First World War. After the war he joined the Freikorps, fought against the Poles in Silesia in 1920-1, worked with those who were attempting to subvert the Weimar constitution, and was an accomplice to the murder of the German Foreign Minister, Walter Rathenau, in 1922, for which he was sentenced to five years in prison. On his release he discovered a talent as a writer and published a number of books both before and after the Second World War. Although the Freikorps were idolised by the Nazis for their resistance to what they perceived as the iniquities of the Treaty of Versailles, Ernst von Salomon himself was no supporter of Hitler. He "found Hitler’s methods of influencing the masses repugnant" and considered National Socialism to be "another, more advanced, form of Bolshevism", both of which, in his view, represented the disintegration of the traditional state and a descent into disorder and chaos. He felt he owed his allegiance to the state of Prussia, rather than Hitler’s Third Reich and his heroes were the army officers and aristocrats who unsuccessfully attempted to kill Hitler on July 20th 1944. Many of them had been officer cadets like himself and with the failure of the plot, in his words: "July 20th 1944, marked the final collapse not only of the Prussian army but of the whole educational world of the nineteenth century."

In 1945 Salomon and his wife, who was Jewish and whom he had protected during the war, were arrested by the Allied Military authorities and imprisoned in a US internment camp, where he claimed he was beaten up and his wife raped by US soldiers. In 1946 he was released with no explanation except that his arrest had been "in error".

His book Der Fragebogen took the form of his own personal answers to the 131 questions in the questionnaire (or Fragebogen) which millions of German people had to complete after the end of the war as part of the Allied de-nazification process. The questionnaire proved to be a singularly ineffective method of doing this, and in the book, Salomon was able to pour scorn on the process, highlighting the hypocrisy of the Allies, while at the same time providing his own interpretation of the history of the previous 30 years, from the end of the First World War to the events following the end of the Second.

In his preface to the English translation, published in 1954, Goronwy Rees attempted to warn English readers not to be deceived by the book.

"It is easy to see that there was a fundamentally false assumption in the idea of conducting a written examination, of 131 questions, of the conscience of a people, and on the basis of the replies calculating the degree of responsibility of each individual …  It has been easy for Salomon to seize upon the naïveté  and the falsity of the assumptions underlying the Fragebogen, and by taking that document at its face value to turn the examination into a farce, a procedure admirably suited to his literary talents … Yet the English reader should not be deceived into taking Der Fragebogen at its face value. He should remember, firstly, that he is in the hands of a very gifted writer."

According to Rees, Salomon was not fully open about his past, as a member of the Freikorps, for his part in the murder of the German foreign minister Walter Rathenau, or the official approval his writings received during the Third Reich, even though he himself had retired from politics and worked as a film script writer during the war.

"The truth is that for a person of Salomon’s past, and beliefs, to dissociate himself, as he does in this book, from all responsibility for the triumph, and the crimes, of National Socialism, is a piece of effrontery which only so brilliant a writer could have attempted with success."

"Since its publication in 1951, over 250,000 Germans have bought Der Fragebogen, despite the fact that some of Germany’s most distinguished critics have condemned it violently both on political and moral grounds. It is difficult not to sympathise with such critics. They represent that class of humane and liberal Germans who still dare to believe, even after the disasters of the last fifty years, that Germany may yet redeem the errors of the past."

I was puzzled by this preface. I could understand that Rees wanted to draw attention to criticism the book had received within Germany, but why did he feel the need to warn English readers not to be deceived by the book? What was he afraid that an English reader might do or think? Why did he emphasise that the author was a "very gifted writer." It didn’t seem to me that Salomon was trying to excuse himself or to conceal his past; the murder of Rathenau, his part in the Freikorps, his political views and his opposition Weimar democracy were all described quite openly. Maybe Rees, like other British and American critics at the time, objected to the razor sharp criticism at the end of the book of some of the actions of the Allies, highlighting their self righteousness and hypocrisy, and implying they should apply the same standards to themselves as they did to the defeated enemy?

I haven’t discovered the answer to these questions. It still seems to me that you don’t need to share Salomon’s nationalist views and his interpretation of the history of the Weimar Republic, to believe that at least some of his criticisms of the actions of the Allies at the end of the war were fully justified. And in any case, why couldn’t English readers be trusted to make up their own minds, living in a democratic country with all the advantages of freedom of information?

But I did discover more about Goronwy Rees. Like Salomon, he was a brilliant writer, as is evident from reading his own autobiography, or more correctly, two volumes of autobiographical sketches,  A Bundle of Sensations, published in 1960 and A Chapter of Accidents, published twelve years later in 1972.

Rees was born in 1909 in Aberystwyth, a small university town in mid-Wales, where his father was a Minister in the Calvinist Methodist church. He won a scholarship to Oxford, and in 1931 was awarded a postgraduate fellowship at All Souls College, which in his own words was:

"One of the greatest gifts Oxford had to bestow, and a sure guarantee of success in whatever career one chose to adopt. When I was elected, the college included among its forty members one archbishop, one bishop, and ex-Viceroy of India, several cabinet ministers, the two brightest luminaries of the English bar and the editor of The Times."

Rees subsequently became a journalist and writer, for The Times, the Manchester Guardian, the Spectator and other journals, an army officer during the war, and a company director and successful author in the years afterwards. He maintained his connection with All Soul’s College becoming Estates Bursar, responsible for college finances, and in 1953 was appointed Principal of the University College of Wales at Aberystwyth.

He also led a double life. One of his best friends was Guy Burgess, who recruited him as a Soviet agent in 1937. Other members of the so-called Cambridge spy ring included Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross. Rees (who was at Oxford rather than Cambridge and who met Burgess through mutual friends) would appear to have actively worked as a spy for the Soviets for only a brief period, before becoming disillusioned with Communism following the Nazi Soviet pact in 1939. However he remained on good terms with Burgess right up to his and Maclean’s defection to Moscow in 1950. Burgess was godfather to one of his children. After Burgess and Maclean "reappeared" at a press conference in Moscow in 1956, Rees published a series of articles in The People newspaper, which described his friendship with Burgess, and hinted strongly that others were also involved in the spy ring, including Anthony Blunt. Ironically, although Blunt was investigated at the time, no further action was taken, whereas Rees found himself severely criticised for his actions by some of his colleagues at Aberystwyth, who considered the articles to be "malicious, salacious and sordid" and he was eventually forced to resign as Principal.

In A Chapter of Accidents, his highly successful second volume of autobiography, published sixteen years after the articles in The People, Rees retold the story and implied he knew that Burgess, Blunt and others were Soviet spies as early as 1937, but claimed he believed that this had all stopped with the start of the war. He said nothing in the book about his own espionage activities, either as a Soviet agent working with Burgess before the war, or in the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), afterwards. 

It’s therefore ironic that Rees should criticise Ernst von Salomon for not being fully open about his past, when he himself is less than fully open in his own autobiography.

Given the admiration Rees expressed for Ernst von Salomon as a "brilliant writer", I wonder to what extent the autobiographical style of Der Fragebogen was a literary  influence on his own writing.

In his first volume of autobiographical sketches, A Bundle of Sensations, Rees makes a point of saying that this was not intended to be a conventional autobiography or life history. He made a virtue out of claiming that, rather than being "a personality with its own continuous history", he was someone who reflected, and was formed by, the events of his time:

"For I was quite certain that I had no character of my own, good or bad, that I existed only in the particular circumstances of the moment, and since circumstances were always changing, so fast, so bewilderingly, so absorbingly, how could it not follow that I must change with them?"

It seems there may be more parallels between Ernst von Salomon, the right-wing German nationalist, and Goronwy Rees, the Communist sympathiser and opponent of fascism, than might be expected. They were both superb writers, they both achieved their greatest public success using autobiography as a literary form to portray the world in which they lived, and they both tried to conceal or re-interpret aspects of their own past, one as a murderer and the other as a spy.

References

Ernst von Salomon, The Answers of Ernst von Salomon to the 131 Questions in the Allied Military Government ‘Fragebogen’ (London: Putnam, 1954) First published in Germany in 1951 as Der Fragebogen. English edition translated by Constantine Fitzgibbon with a preface by Goronwy Rees.

Goronwy Rees: Sketches in Autobiography: ‘A Bundle of Sensations’ and ‘A Chapter of Accidents’ with ‘A Winter in Berlin’, a further autobiographical essay. (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2001). Edited with Introduction and Notes by John Harris